Looking for home

My older sisters and me on the front steps of my personal old Kentucky home.

In a big family, you have to learn how to stand out in a crowd. It's not always easy; in my family, the ten of us were more alike than we were different: Argumentative. Curly-headed. Bookish. Fierce.

There were a few things that distinguished me, but they were modest: I was shy to the point of whispering. I wore glasses. I collected empty boxes, which I hid under my bed, a fire hazard, people said. And I was born in Louisville, Kentucky.

The six older kids were all born in Quincy, Ill., where Guv had attended college on the G.I. bill and later taught English. The twins were born in St. Joseph, Mo., where we moved in the interim until Guv found a job in Duluth, where Heidi was born. But I was the only one of the bunch born in Louisville. It made no difference that I was still a toddler when we moved away and remembered nothing. I clung to Kentucky as Mine, as Exotic, as One of the Things That Set Me Apart.

I had no memories of our house, but I knew its address: 100 Southwestern Parkway. I knew the name of the hospital where I was born: St. Joseph's Infirmary. I knew about Shawnee Park, which was down the street, and Fontaine Ferry, the neighborhood amusement park, and I knew about Bernheim Forest, where we picnicked, and Muhammad Ali, who my father had known when his name was still Cassius Clay. (He was a high school student with a part-time job at the college where my father taught.) All of these things seemed slightly magical to me--real, mine, and far away. During the Kentucky Derby, which we all watched, every year, I misted up a little at "My Old Kentucky Home" and sang along lustily, with meaning.

And here's the log cabin in which I was born. 

It had always been my vague intent to go back, look around, see what memories might be triggered, but years passed and my trips always took me in other directions: California, the North Shore, Montreal, Ireland. This year, last week, I went back. We had friends to visit and stay with. The ticket price was surprisingly cheap. A friend arranged to stay in our house and take care of our dogs. There was no good reason not to go, and lots of reasons to go. And so we went.

This is Louisville. This is where I was born, I thought, as we steered our battleship gray rental car onto the highway and toward the city. Up busy Bardstown Road, past a Kroger's and a Shell Station, past a coffee shop (Heime Brothers) and a bar (Kerns Korner), turn right on Douglass Boulevard, a few more blocks to our friends' house. They lived on a tree-lined street of big old houses--split-timbered Tudors, castles with turrets and big porches, foursquares with circular driveways, presumably for the coach to pull up and let ladies with hoopskirts disembark. The neighborhood was beautiful, with big old trees, quiet winding streets and lush gardens, but it did not speak to me (though it did remind me a little of the East Duluth neighborhood where I grew up). I figured the resonance would come later, when we found Southwestern Parkway.

Our friends' house was big and rambling, with a fanlight over the front door, odd big closets where the cats like to hide, and porches I could live in. When I stepped out into their back yard, fragrant with nodding poppies and soldier-like irises and oh so many blooming pale pink peonies, I lost all ambition. I didn't want to tour around, finding my roots; I wanted to sit under the pergola and chat until the sun grew too bright, and then retire to the upstairs screen porch, where I could read under the lazily rotating ceiling fan, keeping an eye on the mother robin, who was tending her eggs in a nest above the next-door-neighbors' bathroom window.

There was no good reason to leave this beautiful yard.

Every morning--every morning but one, when we slept in shamefully late--we walked with our friend and his black Lab through nearby Cherokee Park, along the leafy, overgrown trails, past the shallow winding stream, past the bird sanctuary (we saw no birds), through the wet grass and back home again.

Later in the day, we roused ourselves from our pleasant torpor and went out and about. We walked through Old Louisville, and admired the mansions. They were mammoth, with beautiful details--gargoyles and mullioned windows, and ivy crawling up brick. Imagine having the wherewithal to build such magnificent houses! And then imagine building them within inches of your next-door-neighbor.

One of the more magnificent of the Old Louisville houses.
While we were gawking at it, a guy came by and told us that this was the original paint.
Turned out he meant the owners had researched the house and matched the original paint.
But for a few minutes we were pleasantly baffled and impressed.

We drove past Spalding University, where my father taught when it was still called Nazareth College. We tried to find St. Joseph's, but it had been torn down. And then we headed along the parkway, looking for number 100.

Nazareth College, way back before Guv taught here.

At the last minute, there was some confusion about the address--did we live at 100 Southwestern Parkway, or 100 Northwestern Parkway? And I had to call my mother. As it turned out, the two parkways met right at our house, and the two 100s were next door to each other. Oh, to be a mailman in that neighborhood. But me, I knew immediately which one was ours--I recognized the stone foundation, the seven steps to the porch, the side lights flanking the front door, the straight white porch railings under the straight white banister. This very spot is where my sister Kristin stood, all in white, holding flowers, to pose for her First Communion pictures. This very spot is where my brother John Patrick stood, aiming his new camera at my father, who aimed a camera right back at him.

John Patrick and his camera.

But how did I know this? From pictures, only from pictures. I had no memories. The house did not leave me cold, exactly; it just gave nothing back. It was just a house.

See? Can't you just picture four little girls standing on these steps?

Here's the whole thing.

I walked around the back, but I was afraid of trespassing, so I only took a quick peek, and no pictures. The yard was long and narrow. I glimpsed the sleeping porch, and a big tree--but surely not the same tree, 50 years later, the big old sycamore my mother had mentioned--and the place where we had had our swingset.

The sleeping porch, aka the best room in the house, and the swingset beyond.

That quick glance felt like a pause--everything there, the house, the porch, the tree, the yard, the sunlight, waiting for seven children to rush out the back door, onto the grass... But there was no movement. No one was there. We, certainly, were not there and I couldn't swear that we ever had been.

I walked around to the front, climbed the steps, rang the doorbell. While I waited, I aimed every nerve toward that house, that yard, that porch. But I felt nothing. No one came out, and I was not bold enough to peer through the windows.

I was here, I thought. I walked right out that door, onto this porch, wearing a headscarf and red tennis shoes.

I conjured up the old photos in my brain, scrolled through my phone for the few I had downloaded, but I couldn't conjure the moment, the feelings, the sensibility. Oh, that mysterious front door. I wanted to walk through it again, even as I knew that the wallpaper, the rugs, the furniture, the people--ah, most importantly, the people--would all be different.

I walked back to the rental car, where my husband and our friend waited. Doug looked nonplussed; I thought you'd be more...  His voice trailed off. Emotional? I said. I don't remember anything.

We drove away, back to our friends' house and the back yard and the friendly black Lab waiting for someone to throw him a ball.

What does it mean to be from somewhere? What makes a place speak to you? I remembered the first time Guv and Trish went to China. Guv had spent years studying Mandarin, first in the Army, and later with his Hong Kong students at UWS. It was years before he and my mother made it to Beijing, and when they did, When I got off the plane, I felt like I'd come home, he told me, and I never forgot that, never forgot that strange, instant and intense affinity he had for a place where he had never been, never lived, had no genetic connection. (We are not, as far as any genealogical studies have shown--and my brother Tommy has delved deep--Chinese.)

I felt something similar the first time I went to Ireland. Guv's mother was Irish, her people from County Clare and the Midlands, and I had been drawn to that country even as a child. I remember poring over the Time-Life history of Ireland, which I got for  Christmas when I was 10, and I remember flying into Shannon Airport for the first time in 1989 with my friend Lila, looking down at all those patches of green, and feeling a great contentment roll over me, as though broken parts were now fitted back together.

Bernheim Forest, 1957

I had expected to feel something similar in Kentucky. I had wanted to feel something similar in Louisville, this place I had bragged about and claimed as my own. But I didn't. I liked it there; we had a great time; we ate good food and drank good beer and hiked at Bernheim Forest (which I did not remember, which did not resonate, but which was beautiful and green), we poked around in museums and went out for brunch and stood above the slow-moving Ohio River and looked across at Indiana. And, best of all, we spent time with good friends.

But it was not my home. It was just a way-station in my life, the place where my mother happened to be pregnant, and where I happened to come kicking and screaming into the world precisely one month early, the place where I had my first bottle, first learned to walk, had my first temper tantrum, slept on my first sleeping porch, and then--with the rest of the Hertzels--moved on.

Tomatoes, with love

My grandfather, John Hertzel, and some of his Missouri bounty.

In the summer, Guv spent as much time as he could outside. He read in the backyard, no sunglasses, the white light of the July sun bouncing off the white page. He worked in the yard in a white t-shirt and knee-length, cut-off pale-blue jeans, planting, trimming, nurturing with a tenderness he rarely showed his children. He drove down to Park Point and read on a towel stretched out in the sand. He walked the neighborhood in the evenings, carrying a stick to ward off dogs.

He was from Missouri, and he loved heat and light. That burning sun that turned my face bright pink and made me languorous only made him stronger.

The back yard belonged to him, and we mostly stayed out. We kids had the run of the front yard; we set up little wire wickets for croquet, which was never a genteel game with us, but a cutthroat one, with the little click of wooden balls hitting always followed by the loud crack of one player sending another's ball halfway down the block. There were no boundaries. You had to play it all the way back, wait your turn, plot your revenge. If it rolled down the hill to the street, you were in big trouble and arguments ensued. Once, in the heat of the moment, I hit my brother Tommy in the head with my mallet and we are all very lucky that the worst that came of it was a bruise.

Between our yard and the Wunderlichs' house, where there had once been a mountain ash tree, was a permanent dirt spot that was perfectly positioned as home plate for games of kickball. We set up a volleyball net by the porch; we hauled out woven webbed collapsing lawn chairs where we slathered coconut-scented tanning lotion on our legs and dozed; Tommy had a little garden of irises on either side of the front steps; my mother planted a clematis, which climbed up our porch every summer, a deep purple and green.

This was all in the front yard. The back yard belonged to Guv. He lay on his back on a flat wooden chaise longue, holding the book over his head to read. He pushed the zone as much as he could, planting rhododendrons, forsythia and asparagus. But he did not plant tomatoes. He knew that there was no way in Duluth's cold climate he could come close to the steeped-in-sun tomatoes he had grown up on in Missouri. And besides, there was always John: His father, our grandfather, grew the world's best tomatoes, and every summer, more than once, he would wrap several dozen in pages torn from the St. Joseph News-Press, pack them carefully in a big cardboard box, and ship them to our house.

I don't know if he wrote ahead to let us know a box was arriving; I only remember the excitement as my mother unpacked the carton in the kitchen, pulling away the crumpled newspaper, washing the tomatoes gently under the running water at the sink, slicing them with a serrated knife and letting them lie in their red and beautiful juice on a blue plate. Did I like tomatoes? How could I not, when they arrived with such celebration?

Tart and juicy and firm red tomatoes, and sweeter, milder yellow tomatoes--first one was my favorite, then the other. We ate them plain, with salt, for dinner, for lunch on toast with bacon and lettuce; we ate them fast because tomatoes don't last and you never know when you're getting another box.

One summer my little sister, still in a high chair, refused to eat anything else, and my parents, normally sticklers for the three-bite rule, indulged her for one dinner, allowing her as many tomato slices as she could eat.

My grandfather at 18, a dandy.

John grew up in the city, never a farm boy, but he took to gardening with a passion. Every year, he started right after Christmas, poring over the Burpee catalog and ordering seeds. Seeds, always seeds, which he planted by the dozen in empty milk cartons. No bedding plants for him.

In February, he began to work the ground--February, when in Duluth we were still waddling around in parkas and shoe-boots through tunnels carved from mountains of snow.

He had farmer friends who saved manure for him over the winter. He preferred cow manure but would use horse manure in a pinch. While we were shoveling the sidewalks in Duluth, John was driving his red Chevy Impala out into the country, shoveling shit in Missouri, shit that he worked into the soil for his lettuce, radishes, spinach, beans, peas, cucumbers and tomatoes.

The summer we lived in St. Joe, the summer before my memories begin, my older siblings were allowed to pile tomatoes in their little wagon and pull it down the street; they came home with an empty wagon and a pocketful of money. There were so many tomatoes that even with all of us living there we couldn't eat them all.

John, Gramma and Guv

Over their years together, John and Gramma fought, they argued, she baited him, he might have hit her. But they had a ritual: When John brought the first basket of produce in from the garden--the garden that took up more and more of the yard every year--he presented it to Gramma, who always ooed and ahhed. Those beans! So crisp! That lettuce! So tender! And those tomatoes--oh, those magnificent tomatoes.

The week Gramma died, I was out of town, out of phone reach, on a camping trip with a friend. I missed her funeral, missed the reunion of cousins, missed the excitement and the sadness of going back to Missouri. A few days later, my aunt told me, John brought the first bounty of green beans into the house. He sat at the kitchen table in his battered straw hat and his wife-beater shirt, snapping the beans, one by one, and the tears slid down his face. Out in the yard, a hundred tomatoes slowly turned red in the hot Missouri sun.

Making things grow

Guv and his tomatoes, in a warmer climate.

There is a picture somewhere, an old color slide, of me kneeling in the grass in front of Guv's rock garden in the back yard, pulling weeds. The mysterious and beautiful black-and-white photos end around 1961 or so, when my parents started shooting slides, which we loved but which were harder to look at. They required equipment and cooperation.

Many nights we'd clamor, "Let's watch slides!" and usually the answer was no, it's too late, it's too much trouble, but every now and then the answer was yes, and someone would haul the screen out of its rapidly disintegrating box and set up the shaky aluminum tripod legs in the space between the living room and the dining room, and someone else would retrieve the carousel projector from the bottom doors of the little Dutch cabinet (or so we called it, misunderstanding and mispronouncing the word "hutch"), and we'd all sit cross-legged on the carpeting and stare, rapt, at the pictures of our history as they flashed by, our history of weeks and months and maybe even a couple of years ago. We'd squeal and blush and look away whenever our own face appeared, gigantic on the screen, and then it would be replaced by someone else's face and we would intensely wish our own face back.

After 1966, we watched the slides less often, and those of us who were still small and silly and unthinking kept up a running commentary, chattering about when and where the picture was taken, and when a picture of John Patrick showed up we would say, knowledgeably, "That was when Bobby was still alive," and my parents would get up and walk out of the room. One of the older kids would kick us to make us shut up. But why? It was just a fact to us, another bit of our history that we needed to repeat and repeat in order to understand.

When the white light beamed empty, showing us the blank glittering screen, the disappointment was palpable. We wanted more! More big-screen color pictures of ourselves, proving that we were important and loved and photographed and having a happy childhood.

But the show was over, everything was dismantled, and life was no longer in Technicolor. I do not know where those slides are anymore; they were cannibalized, bit by bit, by older children as they left the nest, maybe wanting some reminder of their young years, and then by the rest of us more boldly because, why not? The carousels had already been robbed. Our history was already edited.

But I clearly remember the picture of myself pulling weeds. My head is down, I am leaning on one hand and reaching with the other. In the image, I am not prominent; it is the garden that gets most of the frame. Guv took it, Guv the gardener, Guv the Missouri boy, who built that rock garden and planned it carefully, planting it with sweet, modest flowers--pansies, snapdragons, petunias, and one yellow primrose in memory of Bobby. He encircled the whole thing with snow-on-the-mountain, which climbed over the rocky perimeter and made its way to the center. It was my job to keep it in check.

"You have to pull it out by the roots," Guv said, but I didn't; my hands weren't strong, and I didn't want to go to the trouble of doing it right: Moistening the soil, and using a tool. I just grabbed with my little hands and pulled, breaking off the ivy at ground level. It looked like I'd done my job, but of course I had not and so had to do it again, often.

Not really gardening; just playing in the mud.

I wanted to love gardening because Guv loved gardening, and I admired and adored him. He set up a grow-light in the basement (and sometimes he brought it upstairs and put it in the fireplace), and he started spring seedlings under its weird purplish glow, tending them carefully, watering them gently, coaxing them along.

He gave us plants, which we grew in clay pots in the front picture window: gloxinias, and begonias. I had to be reminded to water mine, and when I did I tried to mimic Guv's nurturing ways, talking quietly to my flower, pouring water gently on the leaves to give them a bath.

"Don't water the leaves," Guv said. "They'll rot."

And so in exasperation I decided that gardening was too hard. I would never understand it, and, never persistent when challenges came my way, I gave up. I buried myself in "The Gateway to Storyland" and wondered: If not gardening, then what?

Gramma

The caption in the old photo album reads,
"Bernice and Flicky and tea kettle."

My grandmother was mean, but I loved her.

Every September, she and my grandfather John drove up to Duluth from St. Joe to visit. On the appointed day, I waited and waited on the front sidewalk, wanting to be the first to spot their red Chevy, and then sometimes it came bumping down the back alley instead, fins gleaming in the autumn sunshine, and I could hear shouts of "Gramma's here! Gramma's here!" and I raced around the house into the back yard, trying to catch up.

John was here too, of course, but Gramma was the main attraction.

Gramma took possession of whatever room she walked into. She was confident, decisive, dismissive, and mean. She could look you in the eye and tell you that you weren't as pretty as your sister. She could glance around our stuffed house with a look that carried weight and say to my mother, "Patsy, I don't know how you do it," and though the words were kind somehow I knew the meaning was not. She was the only person I knew who could really get Guv's goat, and that made her, in my eyes, deeply powerful. Her visits were to see Guv, her oldest child, her firstborn son, and maybe John Patrick, my oldest brother, whom we called Bobby. The rest of us--well, we were just the squealing masses, to be endured.

I didn't care. I loved both of my grandparents, John and his false teeth and his feigned deafness and his love for pickled herring, which I shared, and which I only got to indulge once a year, when he visited; and Gramma, with her pointy glasses just like mine, and her wide butt and the way she called my father "Leo" in that gentle Missouri-accented voice of hers, or, more often, "Now, Leo," in a patronizing way that always set him off, which was, of course, her intent.

Her parents were both Irish, and once she sat down with me and showed me on a map where her family had come from. The town had a long name which I knew I would never remember, so I memorized only the first half: "Bally," which was so funny and odd that I figured I would have no trouble finding it again. (Until months later, when I hauled out the map again, and discovered that half the cities in Ireland start with the word "bally," which means "town." It was many years later before I learned the name of the place where her ancestors had come from--Ballybunion, in the West.)

Gramma played favorites. She loved Bobby and also my brother David, but she did not love me, whom she called "Little Miss Perfect." I didn't care. I got her to play cards with me, and I hung around whatever room she was in, and I always tried to sit next to her in the car. There might be fireworks with Gramma--she might tell me that my cousin Patti was smarter and prettier than I was, and knew how to do cartwheels, and was learning Spanish--but it was always interesting.

Guv and Gramma in the 1950s.

Gramma grew up on a farm outside of Amazonia, and she had ambitions. It had been her wish to get to the big city: first St. Joseph, and then Kansas City. But she only made it as far as St. Joe, where she married my grandfather. During the Great Depression, they moved from tiny rented house to tiny rented house with John in and out of work. He tried to get his in-laws to raise a pig for them on the farm, to slaughter so that the family could eat, but Gramma's father said, "Do you know how much work a pig is?" and wouldn't do it. That's the kind of people she came from.

When Gramma was a young girl, her parents sent her to a convent school in Clyde, Mo., for a year, where the world was briefly, tantalizingly opened to her. She fell in love with art and books and beauty. They could only afford one year, so after that it was back to the farm, but she remembered Clyde forever as the best year of her life.

There are so many family stories that swirl around Gramma, and I don't know if any of them are true. I suspect that all of them are partly true. Keeping Guv awake at night when he was still in a high chair, playing cards. Pointing a shotgun out the window at John one afternoon when they'd had a fight. (The legend goes that Guv had to go into the house and disarm her, but later I was told the story had been told backwards: Gramma wielded words like a rapier; it was John who resorted, perhaps out of frustration, to violence, and it was John who aimed the shotgun while Gramma hid in the garage.)

When Guv came back from World War II and prepared to go to college on the GI bill, Gramma walked down the street to consult with the parish priest on where he should go, and that is how Guv ended up at Quincy College, a Franciscan school in Illinois.

The St. Joe house was haunted, and Gramma was deeply offended that she never saw the ghost nor sensed it. Others did: my siblings, my cousins, my uncle. John claimed that the ghost used to walk past him and Gramma in the kitchen when they were playing cards, and that it sometimes gave him tips on the Daily Double. But Gramma never saw the ghost, and she took this personally, being Irish and Catholic and spiritual and superstitious and all. If anyone was going to see it, she figured, it should be her.

One of my brothers was so spooked when we visited St. Joe that he slept in his clothes in case he had to run out of the house at night. My aunt and my mother both knew, when they passed the cemetery a block away, whether or not the ghost was active in the house. But Gramma never noticed a thing.

When I was about eight years old, I made Gramma my penpal, more or less against her will. I was given a box of stationery for my birthday, pale blue with scalloped edges, I requested a year's supply of stamps for Christmas, and I wrote to her in pencil, laboriously. Every letter began: Dear Gramma, How are you? I am fine.

And she wrote back. Mysterious letters full of information that I didn't understand and didn't care much about. She and my aunt were having a porch sale? They were selling a porch? Bu was sick? Bu was her dog, a German shepherd we were all afraid of. She brought him along one September, and Guv turned pale when the big dog leaped out of the Chevy. When Guv was a small boy, his father had a job selling eggs on the streets of St. Joe, and Guv used to ride along out to the country where John bought the eggs from farmers. He always brought along scraps of fat and ends of old meat, to throw when the farm dogs came roaring up to the car. The dogs would take off after the food, and John would dash into the farmhouse, leaving tiny Guv (Leo, then) quaking in the front seat.

So when Bu arrived in Duluth one fall, all 80 pounds and black and brown fur of him, Guv made Gramma leave him in the basement for the whole week. She got up early to take the dog on walks, but I only caught glimpses of him--his broad muscular back slipping in the side door, his pointed ears poking up from her back car window when she took him for a drive. Whenever any of us walked into the kitchen we had to pass the basement door, which was kept not just shut that week, but locked. "Get away from there!" Guv would say, sometimes grabbing us roughly by one arm. "There's a dog down there!"

And Gramma, who knew about Guv's fear of dogs, and yet who brought her big police dog with her anyway, leaned against the sink, crossed her arms, and watched.

The domestic arts

Me and my mother.

My mother could do anything. She could sew, she could cook, she could bake, she could drive us places on those steep Duluth hills in a car with a clutch during a blizzard and not slide back, not get stuck. She loved her sky-blue Corvair and got a kick out of bringing it to a gas station and saying "yes" when the attendant asked if he should check the oil. He'd open the hood and there was nothing there. (Corvairs had the engine in the back.) She also got a kick out of getting carded at the liquor store and, instead of digging out her driver's license, pointing out the window at her station wagon packed with children.

She showed me how to do things, and I learned: How to take a brown paper sack from the grocery store, cut it down the sides so that it lay flat, and make a dust cover for my school textbooks.  How to make lumpless gravy by shaking the flour with water before adding it to the pan drippings. How to use a paring knife, how to slice against the thumb without slicing into the thumb.

I learned how to drain tunafish, how to dust off the top of a can before opening it, how to use a serrated knife on a tomato instead of a flat blade, how to hit a head of iceberg lettuce on the counter, hard, in order to loosen the core, how to shake out wet laundry, piece by piece, before tossing it into the dryer. I learned how to peel an onion. I learned to draw a broom slowly, to pull the dirt, rather than swish back and forth briskly, which scattered it.

She taught me that boys hate to lose more than girls hate to lose, and that I should let them win every now and then if I wanted them to like me. She taught me not to squat over a puddle while wearing a skirt. (This lesson, I think, was a joke, one she had heard from Catholic nuns.)

My mother could do anything. She did not love to cook, she hated to sew, she hauled wicker baskets of dirty clothes down the basement stairs and sorted and washed and dried and folded and hauled them back upstairs and did not have a particularly good time doing any of it. But she did it, all of it, and she did it beautifully, and I learned from that, too.

I learned to wash windows, squirting them with blue Windex and rubbing the dirt away. That was so fun I'd drag the Windex all over the house, washing windows in every room, bringing the squirt bottle back nearly empty. She taught me to dust furniture, which was pretty much the same satisfying act: squirt the Endust, polish the wood. When I was done, the whole house smelled sharply of chemical lemon.

I liked ironing, the warm smell of clean clothes, the hiss of steam, the squirt of spray starch, the steady, gentle movement that erased the wrinkles. At first she set me up with handkerchiefs and dish towels--nice flat items that didn't really require ironing, but which gave me an enormous sense of satisfaction to finish. Eventually she showed me how to nose the tip of the iron in around shoulders and collars of men's shirts and then hang the stiff, pressed shirt on a wooden hanger from the end of the ironing board.

One afternoon when my mother was gone--to the grocery store, to the dairy, who knows where--my older sister Nancy suggested that we all work hard to clean the house, as a surprise. Faced with an entire house of work, I found this not fun, but we did it. Nancy got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the checkerboard kitchen floor. The rest of us put away scattered magazines, hauled the lumpy vacuum cleaner out of its hidey-hole inside the window seat and roared it through the living room, sucking up crumbs. We changed sheets, made beds, put laundry away. I did my famous Windex-and-Endust tricks.

And when Trish got home, the house was clean. "Well! This is a good time to do the deep cleaning," she said, and Nancy said no no no, we did this to give you some time to yourself. And Trish sat down on the couch and picked up a book.

And I learned from that, too.

One day when I was quite small and deep in some kind of complicated project understandable only to me--something involving paper, and glue, and Scotch tape, and a big mess--I ran upstairs to where my mother was working and I said, "Where are the scissors?" And she didn't stop her work, kept pulling the sheet taut and fluffing the pillows, as she answered, "I think they're downstairs in the top  drawer of the built-in cabinet." I dashed downstairs, and as I put my hands on the two ornate metal drawer pulls of the built-in, the shattering thought occurred to me: The scissors might not be inside. It was possible that my mother, my infallible, competent, genius mother, might be wrong. She might not know everything, I thought.

This was the first time I understood this, and I pulled open the sticky drawer with trepidation.

There lay the scissors, among the bits of wrapping paper and cloth napkins and half-burned candles and other detritus of life. I grabbed them and returned happily to my complicated project. Yes, my mother might some day be wrong. She might not know everything. But not yet. Not this time.

In the kitchen, at midnight, of my friend's house on Water Street

I am in the kitchen of a friend's house on Water Street in Duluth, Minnesota. It is 1964, maybe. Or 1965. It is midnight, the room is dark, the windows are black, and we are having a secret snack, just the two of us. The other girls at the slumber party are splayed on the floor in sleeping bags and quilts, perhaps finally asleep, perhaps still gossiping viciously in hissing whispers.

I don't know why my friend chose me for the midnight snack--she is one of the most popular girls in school, and I don't know why she invited me to the party at all. But I am thrilled to be here.

I am special. I will be popular! We giggle and gossip and spread jam and honey on bread. She leans in close. She tells me I am her new best friend.

When I got the invitation to the slumber party, my mother said, "I bet the father makes breakfast. Fathers always make breakfast at these things; he'll probably make pancakes."

I had never been to a slumber party before, and the idea of a father making breakfast was as impossible and unfamiliar as the party itself. Really? If I had a slumber party, would Guv make breakfast for my friends?  I shook my head. I would never have a slumber party; there would be nowhere to put anyone. Our house is full; our beds are full.

And Guv ate breakfast in bed, on a tray, with the newspaper and a carafe that held precisely two cups of coffee.  He would never get up and make pancakes for a crowd.

Trish called the parents of my friend and then decided I could go. I became a nervous wreck. Do I have clean pajamas? Should I bring my own pillow? Do I have to bring a birthday present? Who else will be there? What will we talk about? Will anyone talk to me?

I did not have a good history of parties. Two years before I had been invited to a birthday party at a restaurant at the Plaza. On our way there, Trish said, "Oh, no! Are you supposed to bring a present?"

I didn't know. I'd never been to a birthday party before. I was dressed up in my brown coat with the peter pan collar and my school shoes. The shoes had a strap that went across the instep, Mary Jane-style, but I hated the strap and pushed it down around the back of the shoe so that it looked like I was wearing ballet flats. The shoes looked funny from behind, with that strap behind the heel, but I didn't care; I only cared about what they looked like from the front, the part I could see. I swung my feet out and looked at the toes, all shiny and strapless, and I was happy.

Trish pulled into the parking lot of Woolworths. "Wait here," she said, and raced into the store. She came back with a big plastic teaset in a box covered with clear film. I was filled with avarice. "I want one," I said, and Trish said, "We can't afford it." Out of the sack she pulled wrapping paper and scotch tape, and she wrapped the present on the back seat of the car before driving me across the street and depositing me at the restaurant.

I staggered in with the huge box and was overcome with shyness, and for the entire party I did not speak a word out loud, only in a whisper. I raised my hand to my mouth and whispered behind it, until the nice mom at our table said, "Why are you covering your mouth? Do you not want the people at the next table to read your lips?" I did not know she was joking, did not really even understand what she was saying. I just nodded yes, and after that I didn't speak again.

The slumber party was a very different event. Trish drove me to the address on Water Street and we stopped in front of a shabby house that looked out over the lake. We had crossed the railroad tracks to get here, crossed London Road; these were not the fine houses up on the hill with big front porches and yards; these were rough houses, close together and dark, facing the rocky shore and the black water. "Are you sure you want to do this?" Trish said, and I nodded, sick with misery and excitement and dread.

And now I am in the kitchen with my friend, just the two of us, eating jelly sandwiches at midnight. Earlier, we had all gossiped about everyone we knew, lying in our sleeping bags and mounds of blankets on the living room floor, and we had held a seance and tried to raise the dead, and my friend's mother had come down at 11 p.m. to make us popcorn, and some time after that was The Fight. My friend and her best friend began quarreling, and the room grew tense and unhappy as they hurled their bitter accusations at each other. I lay in my sleeping bag and wanted it all to be over. And then my friend said, "Laurie, let's go get a snack," and I was anointed, I was golden, I crawled out from the covers and trotted happily after her. This was such a turn of events! Not only was I invited to this party, but I was now the best friend of one of the most popular girls in the class!

Full of bread, full of popcorn, full of my own growing importance, I slept well. In the morning, my friend's father came downstairs and made waffles for us, pouring them into the smoky blackened waffle maker, drenching them in syrup. The kitchen looked smaller in the daylight, shabbier, our jam knife still sticky on the crumbed countertop.

My friend did not speak to me. She and her best friend were too busy whispering to each other over the waffles, the rest of us unimportant, the rest of us left to make our own fun.

I knew, then, what had happened, though I still did not quite understand how. We went to sleep thick as thieves, woke up estranged. When did they make up? And why had I not seen that that was certainly what was going to happen? The stolen moments in the kitchen with the honey and the jam filled me with sorrow. I had liked being the new best friend. I had loved knocking the old best friend off her pedestal. And now it was over, I was back to being just me.

I waited outside for Trish, watched the other mothers drive up and collect their daughters, and then it was my turn, dragging my pillow and my pajamas behind me as I climbed into the station wagon.

"Well?" Trish said. "Did the father make pancakes?"

"No," I said, turning my head to look out the window. "He made waffles."  Mothers, I thought. They don't know anything.

Memoir and memory, part two

Adorable Tommy, free from my jokes.

I remember everything, I remember some things, or maybe I remember nothing. I have glimpses, I have bits of stories, I have impressions. I remember the white strip of light under the closed kitchen door. I remember being told not to touch the dining room curtains because we didn't want to spook the birds at the feeder. I remember "Miss Burns Fills the Bird Feeder," but I do not remember what it meant; it was just a silly thing that Guv said, pretending a lisp.

Those who were there at the time offer corrections. That's not how it happened. That's not why it happened. That was in Louisville, not Duluth. No, it couldn't have been Louisville. It was Duluth. Our back stoop wasn't concrete; it was wood. By golly, it was wood! How did I get that wrong? Mr. Hammer didn't have pear apples, he had peach apples. Pear. Peach. Pear. Peach. The words become meaningless, I forget which side I am arguing, but the memory stubbornly remains.

Mostly, I remember feelings. I remember trying so hard, always, to figure things out. What did this mean? What should I do? What is the right way for me to react?

There was joking at the dinner table, joking I didn't understand. The older kids would say something that was quite obviously not true, and Guv would laugh. Why? Why is it funny to say something that isn't true? Why is that not lying? It's sarcasm, I was told. It's irony.

I wanted to try. I wanted to make people laugh. My mother called for Tommy, and I told Tommy, "Go hide in my closet." And Tommy did.

Trish called and called. She came upstairs. "Have you seen Tommy?" "No." I stifled a giggle. I was being ironic. I was being sarcastic. I couldn't wait for the laughter. She went downstairs, checked the basement.  Pretty soon I heard siblings fanning across the neighborhood, calling, "Tommy! Tommy!"

Tommy tried to emerge from the closet; I shoved him back. "I think I should come out now," he said, his muffled voice sounding worried. "No," I said with great false confidence. "It's a joke." But I was beginning to feel doubt. When was the joke over? When would there be laughter? I didn't understand the endgame.

Trish came back upstairs. "Are you sure you haven't seen Tommy? We can't find him anywhere!"

"No," I said, but this time Tommy came wriggling out from behind the shoes and skirts and boxes of stuff.

Later, sobbing through my punishment, I tried to explain. "It was a joke! It was supposed to be funny!" And no one could tell me to my satisfaction, to any comprehension, why it was funny when Kristin told a lie at dinner but not when I told a lie in the afternoon. It was all the same to me: truth, and untruth. The injustice of it inflamed me, made me cry harder. It wasn't fair! "Life isn't fair," Guv said. He might not have said it then, at that time, but he said it often, and it always made me gnash my teeth. "It should be!"  Shrug. "It isn't."

What was the joke Kristin told? Who came upstairs to soothe me as I wept? I wish I knew. I remember only the delight at playing the joke, slowly supplanted by doubt, and then by frustration at being so completely misunderstood.

I remember the light under the kitchen door. I remember birds in the back yard, pecking at the seeds on the snow. I remember Miss Buhns filling the buhd feedah. I remember standing on the low rung of Mr. Hammer's fence, reaching through the bars and stealing pear apples. Peach apples. Pear apples. I remember my first joke, and it was a disaster.

And just like that, my life could so easily have changed

When I was in second grade, the driver kicked me off the school bus. On a bright sunny morning I was waiting for the bus, as I had every school morning for two and a half years, on the corner of Fourth Street and 24th Avenue East. The twins, who were in kindergarten, were wiating with me. The bus pulled up, the doors creaked open, my brothers climbed in, lifting their little legs high to make the step.

The driver looked at me as I waited on the sidewalk, and he said, "You--you have to walk." And he pulled the doors shut and roared off in a belch of exhaust.

I blinked, and then I began walking down the street toward the school. I was an obedient child, and I listened to my elders. If I wasn't supposed to be on the bus, I wasn't supposed to be on the bus. Last week, I rode the bus. This week, I was banned.

Tommy looked at me through the glass of the back door and stuck out his tongue--a mocking gesture that he instantly regretted and apologized for many times over the years.  I barely noticed; I was too busy trying to figure out what I had done to get myself banished.

As it turned out, the bus was only for the younger grades; I had been skipped from first into second grade the week before, which suddenly made me too old to ride. By second grade you were expected to be big enough and strong enough to walk. I was neither big nor strong, but the walk to school was a walk I knew well; I came home every day for lunch, and I often walked home in the afternoon with Miss Larson, the beloved fourth-grade teacher who lived in the Banana House and who had a kind, kind heart and walked with a limp.

"What would you like to be when you grow up?" she asked me once as I scuffed along through the bright leaves, and I thought hard before saying, "A secretary." "Why is that?" she asked. My answer came quickly: "Because I don't want to be a nurse." She nodded thoughtfully and did not argue.

The walk to school took me along Fourth Street to 21st Avenue East, to the house with the cement wall that I always walked on (and once fell off, arriving at school with scraped and bloody shins). There, I turned down the steep hill, walked past my friend April's apartment, the lake shimmering at the bottom of the hill, and then turned on Second Street and walked three more blocks to the school.

It was an easy walk, downhill all the way. Going home was tougher, but I broke up the steepness by cutting through Quiet Corner, a little stretch of Third Street that dead-ended at a ravine. There was a tiny fairytale house on the corner of Third Street and 22nd Avenue that I planned to live in some day, a sweet house with a sloping roof and the deep ravine and rushing creek right out the back door.

This was the same route I took when I went to visit my friends--April, or Jolane, or Jayme, and this is the route I was strolling along the sunny afternoon when the car stopped. I was on my way to play practice at Jolane's house on First Street, and I waited for the car to move on so that I could cross.

Instead, the driver leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. "Get in," said the man behind the wheel. "I'll give you a ride downtown."

And just like that, the world stopped. I was a little girl, not yet 10 years old, on my way to visit a friend so that we could rehearse a play for school. The sun was shining. I was alone. I was an obedient child; I did what adults told me to do. Get on the bus. Get off the bus. Get in the car.

The man was older, and he was wearing a hat, like the dads in school readers, like lots of older men. When we were riding in our own car, we used to crane our necks to see if the driver in front of us was wearing a hat; that meant they were old, and that meant that they were driving too slow, and that meant that we should go around them! Pass them, Guv! He's wearing a hat! And sometimes we would pass them and we'd all turn and stare as we sped by in the station wagon at the other driver, ho-di-doeing along, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, wearing a hat.

My grandfather John, momentarily hatless.

My grandfather wore a hat with a tiny red feather tucked in the band, and sometimes, to make us laugh and squeal and run away, he'd push his false teeth out of his mouth with his tongue.

This man stared at me. He did not push out his teeth. His hat did not have a feather. He did not look joyful or playful; he stared at me and he looked as though he expected to be obeyed.

I stared back, and then I blurted, "I'm not going downtown!" It was the truth; I was supposed to obey, I was not supposed to lie, and while something felt wrong, wrong, wrong about this man staring at me and wanting me to get in his car, I could not defy him so I had to deflect.

The man swore, and he gunned the motor and shot through the intersection, but by then I was running fast, down the hill, away from him, as fast and as far as I could go. I was neither big nor strong, but I was smart and scared, and I listened to my pounding, fearful heart.

Saturday

Our family was big on picnics, and sometimes Saturday
involved eating a meal outside.

The trick was to get up really early, before anyone else, and take possession of the TV. That way, I could watch 'Mighty Mouse' and sometimes 'Underdog' instead of 'Sky King,' which the older kids loved and which was not a cartoon and which was, therefore, boring.

Breakfast was cereal, eaten cross-legged on the floor, with the bowl balanced on my thighs, chomping away at as much sugar as possible. Trish didn't buy really sweet cereal--no Lucky Charms or Count Chokula. We got the healthful stuff: corn flakes, or sugar frosted flakes, or Life. So I just grabbed the sugar bowl from the breakfast nook and loaded it on myself.

The sludgy milk that collected in the bottom of the bowl was so so good and it is a wonder that I had any teeth left at all.

After the cartoons came chores: In addition to our individual tasks--mine was dusting the dining room shelf where the three shoemaker elves lived--we were expected to clean our room and make our bed. I shared a room with three other sisters and there was nowhere to put anything, and since I slept on a mattress on the floor there was no under-the-bed to stuff things. So it was best to just try to skip that responsibility and sneak outside and play.

Hopscotch, drawn on the front sidewalk in colored chalk, with squares that started big and foot-sized and dwindled until the end, where they were so small there was only room to balance on your toes. I did not do this on purpose.

My brother and his hula.

Or jump rope; I was a champion; I could jump rope all day long. Sometimes we had hula-hoops, with little ball bearings inside that made a shikshikshik sound as you swiveled your Elvis hips. I never got the hang of that, never got the rhythm going, and the hula would slither down my legs to the ground and I'd pick it up and haul it back up to my waist and get going again, and down it would go, like a striptease artist working off a noisy pair of pants.

In the summer, every day was Saturday, and I lived outdoors from morning til night. On the hill of our front yard, right at the boundary with the Grindys' yard, there were a couple of rocks and a hollow just the right size for my six-year-old butt. I carried a book outside, plucked some of the tall soft grass that we called "fairy brooms" from the boulevard by the street and lined the hollow with the grass, and then sat there, reading and keeping an eye on the comings and goings of Fourth Street.

I was queen of the neighborhood in that little natural throne, the lord of all I surveyed: the boxer lady, walking past with her dogs; the Lemon kids, shrieking as they ran around their yard; Mr. Olson from the next block over, striding purposefully to the mailbox on the corner as he did every day, perhaps for the exercise more than the correspondence; the little Wunderlich kids, toiling past on their tricycles up and down the sidewalk, the youngest one always in a saggy, grimy diaper.

Teen-aged girls walked by in short-shorts that showed off their long tanned legs, and I looked down at my own chubby knees and wondered when in my life they would ever be smooth and sleek and not covered in scrapes; I was constantly falling and my knees were scabbed and bandaged from April until October.

If I was lucky, often on Saturdays there was a wedding at the Church Across The Street, and I would sit and sit and sit, waiting and waiting and waiting for the bride to emerge. And when she did, always in a flowing white dress, a tall Ken Doll at her side in a dark suit, I would stare, open-mouthed, leaning slightly forward, drinking in the beauty and the ritual, anticipating the shower of rice and the shrieks of her gorgeous friends.

And then, there it was! Rice flying through the air, the bride laughing, raising her hands to shield her lovely face, the grains caught in her long hair and net veil, the Ken Doll laughing, too, and brushing the white from his shoulders as they escaped into a car, dragging with tin cans and crepe paper, painted over with shaving cream.

Off they roared to their new blissful life, and the guests milled around for a while and I willed them away, and once they had dispersed, like a flash I was across the street, squatting on the pavement, scooping up the rice to save, a lucky charm, an homage to the future, a talisman that would guarantee me --what? A veil, a Ken Doll, a grafittied car? Or something else, something more subtle, something I didn't yet understand, didn't yet know I wanted, the grit under my feet, the sun on my head, my fingers scrabbling across the pavement for the elusive white grains, which rolled away even as I tried to drag them close, always just slightly out of reach.

My secret places

One of my brothers in the back yard. Winter, 1960.

It was a big house by most standards--we liked to call it a "four story house," but that was only true if you counted the basement and the attic. Counting the basement was legitimate; it was part of our play area--the chalkboard was down there, hanging on the beadboard wall of the laundry room, and the cramped and dusty space under the basement stairs was the clubhouse for the Secret Z club, an organization my little brothers and I briefly formed, the chief mission of which was to buy candy, smuggle it home, and eat it.

The attic was off-limits without parental accompaniment, accessible up a rough wooden ladder and through a trap door in my parents' bedroom closet, and therefore wasn't part of our daily life but only part of our daily consciousness, a quiet private space above us, waiting to be explored.

So a big, four-bedroom, if not four-story, house, with an open front hallway with a wooden bookcase by the kitchen door, and a living room with a piano and a fireplace with a broad oak mantel, and a high-ceilinged dining room with an ornate hanging light fixture that we grandly called a chandelier, and tall windows that looked out into the snowy back yard and the birch tree. Wide carpeted stairs hugged by a glossy wooden banister led to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms and one small bathroom for twelve people and suddenly the house no longer seemed so big.

The Girls Room was in the front of the house, the biggest bedroom, and until we bought the bunk bed I slept there on a mattress on the floor at the foot of my sister Kristin's bed. Sometimes she stuck her feet out from the end of her covers and demanded that I rub her feet, which I did, trying not to tickle. She had a dark brown birthmark that spread across the toe of one foot, which I found fascinating--the birthmark was thicker and harder than the rest of the skin, and nubby, and rather than disgusting me, it made me wish that I had a birthmark, too, some secret scar that identified me, but I had nothing, just puny arms and nearsighted eyes and hair that always looked uncombed.

A girl so secret you might not notice her.

But I was small, and I was quiet, and my stealth served me well in hunting out quiet places to be alone. I was introverted, uncomfortable in crowds, even when the crowd was my own loud and self-confident family. And so in that house, I hid. I read in closets by the light of a ceiling bulb that turned on and off with the jerk of a grimy cotton string. (And sometimes my brother locked me inside and took off the doorknob and left me there, but as long as there was a light on and a book in my lap I didn't care; I always knew he'd come back and get me, and he always did.) Or I sat, like a cat, under the dining room table, on the oval braided rug, mostly hidden by the white drop of the tablecloth; I assumed no one could see me there and perhaps no one could, but I could see them.

The coat closet on the main floor--just a pole hung in a recessed space between the kitchen and the basement door--was another quiet place to read. The coats hung down and hid me, and since there was always something going on in the kitchen, the warm heart of that house, it was a fine place to eavesdrop. A good place to cower and hide if there was fighting, and a good place to listen if there was something going on. And there was always either fighting, or something going on. Only occasionally was I discovered, with a bellowing, "What is she doing in there?" and I'd crawl out, clutching my book and my new knowledge, and flee up the stairs.

I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, sitting on the cold floor with my back against the door, or perched on the closed lid of the toilet, legs dangling, reading. It was the only room in the house with a door that locked, other than my parents' bedroom, and I tried to ignore the frequent urgent knocking. "Hurry up!" someone would yell.

"Go downstairs!" I yelled back.  There was a bathroom downstairs, one that might have once been a mudroom, a frigid space with a toilet and a sink between the back door and the kitchen, but nobody ever used it except my father. It was too public, and with two doors it was likely that someone might burst in upon you as you sat. Guv never minded, though, and we'd often hear him shutting the door and then letting loose a thunderous pee that you could hear throughout the downstairs, followed by the magnificent crescendo of the flush.

"Laurie's hogging the bathroom! Trish, Laurie's reading in the bathroom!" and I'd finally unlock the door and slink out, hiding my book behind my back and under my shirt, defiantly lying. "I was not!"

There was only one place in that house that was mine, and that was the secret cupboard in the Girls' Room closet. The closet was big, a walk-in, with white-painted shelves fitted all the way around above the clothes pole, and shelves below for shoes.  The shoe-shelf was a good place to sit and read, hidden by my sisters' dangling skirts, a good place to hide if you were in trouble and had stolen some money or read your sister's diary or hit your brother and were going to get killed.

But the secret cupboard above: That was mine. I could barely reach it; it was built high into the wall on the left-hand side of the closet, a two-shelf cupboard that closed with a little metal latch. The whole thing was supposed to be mine, but one of my sisters took over the top shelf, because I was too short to reach it, even standing on my toes on a chair. I resented the intrusion but there was no objection I could legitimately make; I couldn't reach the shelf and I didn't have enough stuff to fill it with anyway. She stuffed it with boring stuff--glossy magazines and girlish things that did not interest me.

But the bottom shelf was all mine. Every now and then a sister would try to annex that space, too, but I defended it passionately, dumping their things on the floor and positioning my box to take up maximum room. I had a cardboard carton of treasures, nothing terribly important, not books, but scribbles and drawings and construction paper and things I'd torn out of magazines that I wanted to hide and keep, empty boxes that I collected because of the possibilities of empty boxes, old pencils, small rocks, paper dolls, coloring books, a feather I had found. Mainly, though, I was passionate about it because it was mine: My stuff. My box. My cupboard. My space.

If I could have, I would have climbed into that cupboard, shoved the box aside, crouched with my knees by my chin, and pulled the door closed. My cupboard. My space. A place to read, a place to hide.

Breaking the Law on the Fourth of July

An early picnic, though not necessarily on the Fourth of July.
This was probably in Louisville, since I am still in my Taylor Tot.

The Fourth of July was the best holiday ever, after Christmas and Halloween. Not only was there a picnic and fireworks, but there was always a watermelon, which we lugged into the basement and kept chilled for days in a sink full of cold water. One tragic year my brother dropped it as he tried to heave it into the laundry tub, and it cracked on the concrete floor. But a cracked watermelon is better than no watermelon, and we ate it anyway, sitting on the front porch eating smile-shaped slices, salting the sweet red fruit, taking huge bites, our faces and hands and arms and legs growing sticky from the juice, swallowing the white seeds, spitting out the black seeds because everyone knew that if you swallowed them they would grow inside your stomach.

Best of all, the Fourth of July was the one day of the year when we were allowed to eat as much ice cream as we wanted.

Guv grilled on the little
charcoal burner out back.

The ice cream came with the caveat that we had to wait until after dinner, and each year I was deeply frustrated because "as much as I wanted" always amounted to the usual one bowl because by then I was full of hamburgers and watermelon. But the possibilities! The possibilities were astounding. And I had long ago learned that anticipation was better than reality, so unlimited ice cream became the stuff of my dreams.

Guv always drove to Superior for fireworks, which were illegal in Minnesota, and I spent a good chunk of the hot afternoon squatting on the sidewalk, patiently hitting caps with a rock. The caps came in a big roll of red squares, like postage stamps, and I'd unroll them a few at a time, and smash them. You had to hit them dead center, which was hard, because I was skittish, anticipating the noise and the sparks that invariably singed my arm.

And so it was: POUND POUND POUND POUND BAM! OUCH! POUND POUND BAM! OUCH!  POUND POUND POUND POUND BAM!

The design of the caps allowed them to be rolled into a cap gun. My brothers had silver long-barreled cap guns that made them look like the Lone Ranger when they brandished them. But the noise of the cap and the flash of the spark were muffled inside the gun. Much better to do it the way Cave Men did, with rocks.

At night there were sparklers, and we were always warned to stay in the back yard in case the police were driving by because these were illegal and we were not supposed to have them and we could get our parents in trouble.

But we never remembered that, chasing each other around and around the outside of the house in our nightgowns, trailing sparks like beautiful fairy goddesses until we were hollered at: "Stay in the back yard!"

The sparklers came in long flat boxes, and Guv always bought two kinds: the thin silver ones, and the fatter, hotter gold ones that rained a torrent of sparks onto your arm unless you kept moving. We lined up, ten little kids holding tight to the handles of our sparkler, and Guv held a cigarette lighter to the tip of each one. It took forever to catch and then it did, suddenly, in an burst of hot sparks, and he quickly pushed my arm away and off I went, spinning into the yard, playing Statue of Liberty, writing my name in the night sky, rivaling the stars and the moon in my incandescence and brilliance, while Guv held his lighter to the next one.

There were fireworks, too, over the Duluth Harbor, and every year we tried for a better vantage point without actually going down to the harbor where we would have to Fight Traffic. One year we went up to Skyline Drive and parked at an overlook; one foggy, damp year we wrapped ourselves in blankets near the Point of Rocks. I loved the fireworks, hated the accompanying boom, which I could feel inside my chest, and which scared me. The fireworks disappeared into the fog and we were left only with the explosion. And then home again, honking our horns with all the other cars to show our appreciation.

One year, when I was perhaps 8 or 9, I got the idea from one of my magazines (I subscribed to "Highlights for Children" and "Cricket" and maybe one other one) to have a party. The written word was constantly putting crazy ideas in my head--was my whole life not already a party? And was the Fourth not enough of a celebration, with watermelon and caps and all? Was not every day Children's Day?

But Trish and Guv indulged me. Guv took me shopping and we bought a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, which we somehow hung on the side of the garage. And Trish baked a sheet cake, which she decorated not with sparklers and fireworks, but with the true meaning of the holiday: A war scene. She frosted the cake in chocolate, like mud, and sprinkled green sugar, like grass, and then used my brother's army men to make a whole battlefield of soldiers fighting and dying. It was spectacular.

I wanted a pinata, too, and maybe there was one and maybe there wasn't, but the donkey game was fabulous, with handkerchief blindfolds, and spinning around, and the mad stumbling flail armed with cardboard tails and thumbtacks and thank God nobody was hurt. And then the cake, sweet and chocolately, with the grass and mud of the battlefield smeared on my lips, and the happy knowledge that watermelon and ice cream still waited, as much as I wanted, or at least as much as I could hold.

And the next morning, arms singed from fireworks, belly round from sweets, I'd lie in bed and hear the birds twittering and feel the warmth of the sun flooding the room through the flimsy curtains, and I could hear Guv intoning gloomily as he always did, every year, "Summer's over after the Fourth of July."

And though I knew he was not right--we had months! Months! before school started again--I shivered just a little, unwilling to acknowledge but unable to ignore the unhappy fact of the passing of time.

Sunday drives

At Gooseberry Falls, 1959

Sometimes, on a Sunday, Guv would round us up and we'd scramble into the beige station wagon and head up the Shore for a drive. Out of town on Highway 61, hugging the lake, cruising through Knife River and Two Harbors and Castle Danger on our way to Gooseberry or Split Rock. Sometimes I got to sit in front, because otherwise I got car sick. My older siblings didn't believe me, thought I was faking, but once we had to stop so I could get out of the car and throw up on the side of the road. The crows laughed down at me from the birch trees.

The lake was on our right, pounding on the rocks, screaming with gulls, lousy with boats, but I turned my eyes the other way, toward the dense forest, watching intently for bears, wolves, deer. I never saw any of them, but I always looked, every time.

At Split Rock Lighthouse, 1959

At Split Rock, we climbed the steps inside the lighthouse and looked out at nothing but blue--water and sky. The height was dizzying.

At Gooseberry, we followed the dirt path to the waterfalls and were careful not to slip on the rocks and be carried down the river to its mouth where we would be spat out into the lake. We watched the dark, tea-colored water foam as it hit the rocks and someone always said, "It looks just like root beer!" and I was instantly thirsty and usually had to pee.

Trish would often stay home; the Sunday drives brought us home in time for dinner, and if she went along there would have been no dinner. Though I always wondered if having a few hours of peace and quiet with her husband and flock of children out of the house might have helped make her decision even easier.

But oh, what she missed! Someone kicking the seat in front of them, someone yelling, "Cut it out!"; squirming children, cries of "Are we almost there yet?," little Laurie Jo craning her neck anxiously on the lookout for wolves while belching and trying to hold back waves of nausea. But also: the lake, the woods, the rushing cold air as we stuck our heads out the window and tried to swallow the wilderness.

If I was lucky, if we had a lot of time, we stopped at Split Rock Trading Post. On the wooden back porch they had a telescope aimed at the lake; you inserted a dime and a shield slid away from the lens and light poured in; I could never get it in focus, could never find a boat, turned it this way and that, saw only a blur of water or sky, and the whole time the telescope was clicking clicking clicking away the seconds and just as a blurry boat came into view, the time ran out and the shield clunked back into place and the session was over and we had no more quarters.

Out back, in the rocky, woodsy area just before the cliff fell down to the lake, there were young animals in cages. Sometimes bear cubs, more often leggy speckled fawns. You could put a dime in a gumball machine and instead of a gumball it would release a handful of corn; Kristin helped me approach the hungry fawn because I was afraid it would bite me--don't wild animals bite?--but with Kristin's arm on my shoulder I was brave. And the fawn's velvety lips nuzzled my palm as it scooped up the corn in one breath and then looked around sadly for more.

Inside the trading post were long rows of wooden tables, packed with wonderful and amazing things: Lake Superior snow-globes, and dark-skinned Indian dolls dressed in fringed buckskin, and beaded belts and tiny shotglasses that said SPLIT ROCK on the side, and plexiglass display cases of turquoise jewelry that rolled past on trays when you pressed a button, and wooden boxes that smelled richly of cedar when you opened the lid. I wanted everything; I wanted one of each; I wanted it all. Guv bought himself a cedar box. He chose a plain one, not one that said SPLIT ROCK LIGHTHOUSE on it in gold, not one that had a Technicolor photograph of Lake Superior embossed on the lid. Just a plain wooden box that smelled inside like the forest.

Guv was always interested in the lake and its traffic and
later edited a newspaper for the sailors on the Great Lakes.

Once he bought me an Indian doll, and once he bought me a lovely silver ring adorned with four squares of turquoise; I was a lucky, lucky girl and when I lost the ring the next summer I wept and begged for another, which I did not get.

On the way back to Duluth there was much talk of root beer, and if were very lucky, and wheedled just the right amount--not too much, not too little, like the Three Bears, we were--we stopped at A & W. I always held my breath as we approached the drive-in, waiting to see which way we'd go: straight past on the highway, or happily into the parking lot, tires crunching on gravel as we slowed.

Guv rolled his window halfway down, and the carhop attached a little metal tray to the pane, which she then loaded down with eight brimming foamy mugs. Guv passed them to the back, one at a time; I got the mini-sized, but everyone else got full-sized mugs, frosty and thick-glassed and slippery. We did not spill. There was much guzzling and glugging and then one of the older kids, usually a brother, raised an empty mug in triumph and yelled, "I got the first stomach ache!" because we'd always been told don't bolt your food; you'll get a you-know-what.

I begged and wheedled for a full-sized glass like everybody else, and one time, perhaps by mistake, I got one.

I was in the back seat this time, wedged between two siblings who got their stomach aches immediately, but mine took forever; I drank and drank and drank but the volume never changed. A brother offered to drink it for me, but I knew better than that; who knew when I'd get root beer again? This was mine. I drank some more.

Guv looked at his watch. "Hurry up." I drank and drank, I did my best, but the glass was still half-full.

The carhop came back, removed the metal tray with all its empties, Guv started up the engine. My eyes grew wide; I still had my glass! I was still drinking! And we pulled out onto the highway and headed home.

I didn't know if I should be ashamed or thrilled or frightened by my theft; I was afraid to tell Guv that I still had my glass. I just drank as quietly as I could, trying to finish before we got home.

Back at 2315, I burst into the house, ran into the kitchen where Trish was making dinner. "Look! Look!" I said. "I got a mug!"  I needed to lay claim to it immediately, with the proper authority. It was mine by theft, but it was mine. It was my first theft, and it was accidental, but it was not my last.

And the heart of my world was that house

Everything started at 2315; in the beginning, that was the whole of my world. I toddled the yard, played in the mud, spent summer mornings in my little-kid squat out on the hot sidewalk, watching the ants march past on their busy to-and-fro.

When the dog lady walked by with her boxers, I flew down our hill to greet her and to pet her dogs, despite Guv warning, "Stay away!" He had a fear of dogs that he could not shake, but those gentle giant boxers, and their owner, endured my embrace.

As I grew, my world grew. Fourth Street stretched to the eastern horizon; I did not go west toward busy 21st Avenue; there was nothing to lure me in that direction, but I wandered two blocks east to Longview Skating Rink, and, as my legs grew stronger, all the way to Holy Rosary Cathedral five blocks down. My expeditions were in imitation of Guv, who took nightly walks through the neighborhood.

The first time I walked all the way to Holy Rosary, I was astounded at my achievement, trudging past strange houses, cars whizzing past me on the busy street. The Cathedral was an end point, not a true destination; it did not occur to me to go inside, just to stare up at its mysterious holy vastness and broad concrete steps, then turn and trudge the five blocks home again.

"Guess how far I went!" I bragged to my sister, who said, scornfully, "That's not far." But it was far; to me, it was a crack in the earth, a hole in the universe, the beginning of my famous wanderings. 

New paths beckoned, paths that I eventually followed--winding Vermilion Road; leafy, quiet Fifth Street, lined with mansions; modest Third Street, with its dead end at the steep ravine.

I developed a bad habit of following people and going into their houses with them. I wandered off to Old Main, picking flowers and forgetting to come home. Late, dirty, with a damp fistful of drooping buttercups, I was punished for not telling anyone when I left. I was made to sit on the bench, that humiliating form of the Hertzel Family Pillory, little brothers dancing in front of me, mocking me in my shame, but the punishment raised a riddle: How could I tell someone where I was going when I had no idea where my feet were going to take me?

The authorities were unmoved.

Trish released me from the bench so that I could have my lunch; the bowl was overfull and as I tried to carry it to the table, the soup sloshed over my fingers, burned my hands, I dropped the bowl, burst into tears, and went back to the bench without being told.

One autumn, Ledhead's sister and I went Trick-or-Treating for Unicef, a project of her Sunday school. I had told her earnestly that we didn't go to church; Guv had been raised Catholic, but he had decided that it was a waste of time, and our Sundays were just like our Saturdays, though with better comics and the dread of school one day closer.

And so she and I went door to door along Third Street, ringing the bells of the bungalows, asking for money. At each one, Ledhead's sister felt the need to explain matters, announcing, "Trick or Treat for Unicef, I'm doing this for my church, this is my friend, she doesn't go to church because her father thinks it's a waste of time."

And the nice women clucked in sympathy, and one took me by the chin and made me promise that when I got older I would go to church, and I squirmed and said the magic word that caused her to release my face: "Ok," and even as I said it I wondered if this could possibly be a promise that anyone would expect me to keep.

We worked our way down Third Street, growing closer and closer to the Allens' house, and the thought of Mr. Allen, so tall and kind and handsome, hearing about my heathen ways began to eat away at me, worry me, make me fear that he would no longer smile at me, maybe forbid me from playing Barbies with his blonde daughter, Sarah.

We reached their house, Ledhead's sister mounted the steps, and I broke into a run. Through the Allen's Woods, that little patch of trees in their side yard, straight up the steep hill of Pilgrim Congregational Church, where we sledded in the winter and played kickball in the summer, across Fourth Street to my front porch.

That welcoming, weathered gray porch, with its white trim and its red front step, and through that balky heavy front door, into that noisy, crowded house, loud with piano music and shouting and laughter and siblings, that place where everyone knew me, still then my sanctuary, still then the place that had to take me in.

At Old Main

You slip out the back door, fly down the shaky wooden steps, across the grass, out into the alley. The gravel hurts your feet but doesn't cut them; you go barefoot all summer and your feet are tough and permanently dirty. You take a bath every Sunday night, right before "The Wonderful World of Disney," but it never occurs to you to scrub your feet:  They are ticklish.

At Mr. Hammer's house, you stop, climb onto the bottom rung of his black metal fence, reach through all the way to the shoulder, trying for a pear apple. Mr. Hammer has three crab apple trees and a pear apple tree; the crab apples are mouth-puckeringly sour little rocks; they are good for throwing at cars, but not much else. The pear apples are a little bigger, and sweeter. You can't enter his yard because sometimes Mr. Hammer is sitting on a lawn chair, back in the shadows in the cool dark space under his high back porch. You don't notice him, and then he speaks and it scares you.

He has dogs: a big black poodle named Bunny, and a prancing white poodle named Jacques. Jacques is not scary. But once Mr. Hammer showed you his left hand, which is missing a finger.  You know how I lost that finger? he asked, and you shook your head. Bunny bit it off, he said, and now whenever you see Bunny, you run.

Today you reach through the fence, grab a couple of not-yet-quite-ripe pear apples, climb down from the fence, and turn up the avenue. Ahead of you, a half block away, is Old Main.

It's the forgotten part of the university campus, a mile away from the busy, new buildings. Four big golden brick structures built a hundred years ago and now mostly empty. Your brothers break in and wander the hallways and venture out on the roofs; you are not interested in the inside, but the outside.

The experimental Lab School is held here during the school year. Some of your friends transferred there from Endion, and you never saw them again. The middle building contains dorms for some of the college students. The women are beautiful and gentle; sometimes you see them lying on blankets in the grass reading paperback books, or rushing out the front door to catch the bus. They always smile at you.

But now it is summer, and the place is nearly deserted. Old Main is the world. It has tunnels and a hidden playground and berry bushes; it has trails that wind through the woods, and a creek you can explore, jumping from rock to rock. It has a monkey puzzle tree; you ride one of the lower branches like a rocking horse; it bounces but does not break. Some day, you think, you will climb high into the branches like your brother. For now, you bounce.

Today you head to the tunnel, scrambling down the bank where the chokecherry bushes grow. They are not ripe yet, but when they are you always grab a few, even though their sourness makes your mouth dry up instantly. You race through the tunnel the way your older siblings taught you--running from rounded side to rounded side, leaping over the stream, back and forth, momentum carrying you, hooting to hear the echo, and then you shoot out into the wilderness on the other side and scramble up the steep bank.

Here is the hidden playground: swings, and a slide. Nobody knows this is here. Nobody at all. You have it to yourself every time, and you are never disturbed. Small white butterflies flit from blossom to blossom in the tall grass, and daisies bloom. Everything smells hot and sweet and the bees buzz in the clover. You are boxed in snugly by trees and the high bank and the sun-warmed brick wall of the Lab School, and you swing and swing and swing, pumping your legs hard, flying higher and higher, so high that the chains jerk when you hit the apogee. You wonder if you can go so high that you twirl all the way around the top of the swingset.

Sometimes you jump. You are not brave; you never jump when the swing is at its highest. You let it slow, first, before leaping off, landing hard in the dirt on your knees.

On another day you are there with your brother, and you climb the hill to the monkey puzzle tree. You ride the rocking horse branch, but it feels babyish; you're getting older, and taller, and your heart wants to do new things, climb high, into the leaves and clouds where your brother now is, going up and up, branch to branch, like a monkey himself.

I can do that, you say with a swagger, knowing that you can't. Go ahead, he says. He is busy climbing. You take it as a challenge, and you grab a branch, pull yourself up, walk your feet up the trunk, kick hard to sling a leg over the branch, haul yourself up, shaking, and there you are, sitting in the leaves and the sky, looking out over the world. You can see the tall imposing front of Mr. Hammer's red brick house; you can see Lake Superior shimmering in the distance; you can see Becky Bridge's house, and you remember the time she and her friend held a little scavenger hunt in her yard, just for you, and the end clue brought you to a kewpie doll sleeping in a box and you could not believe she was going to give it you, the doll was meant for you; nobody ever just gave you something unless it was your birthday.

The branches above you tremble, and your brother leaps to the ground and rolls.

Help me down, you say, and he shakes his head. Jump, he says.

You can't jump, you are up so high, you will crash to earth and break your legs and arms and head. Help me, you say. He waits.

You wait, too, looking out over the grass and through the branches, and you are too scared to move. The tree is at the top of a hill, and you imagine jumping, rolling down the hill and into the street where a passing car will crush you. You wait. Your brother will help you down. You just have to wait.

I'm leaving, he says, and you panic just a little, inside, a jolting feeling to your stomach. But he doesn't move.

The church bells are ringing; it's time to go home for dinner, and you are stuck in a tree and your brother won't help you and so you sniff, just a little, but it doesn't do any good; he just stands there. I'm leaving, he says again, and then, I won't leave, but I won't help you. You got up there, you get down. Jump.

You wait a while longer, and the church bells shimmer in the air and you know when they stop chiming and you aren't home you will be killed. You are hungry and scared and you don't know what to do.

But your brother has not left. He is waiting.

Jump, he says again.  And finally you do, you have no choice, you leap like you do from the swing, and just like when you fly off the swing you land hard, in the dirt, and it hurts, but you are not dead. Your knees are banged up a little, but you stand, shaky, triumphant, angry and happy.  See? Your brother says. Told you.

And you both run home to dinner, the church bells pealing like Christmas Day.